The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  Nickleby led the two poorhouse girls through the maze of crystal-covered buildings and accordion pipes that made up Crystsoil Palace – most of the works given to processing expansion-engine gas from the slops and sewage before sending the torrent of waste spewing into the caverns below. The building seemed strangely majestic for the purpose of taking away the capital’s waste; white stone walls supported by temple-like columns and scattered openings, statues standing in alcoves.

  ‘Ver’fey, what city was the professor talking about?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Ancient Camlantis,’ said the craynarbian. ‘The professor thinks that it was destroyed in a floatquake and its ruins are still drifting through the sky somewhere.’

  Molly laughed. ‘And how’s she going to get high enough to find out? Train a flock of flying pigs?’

  ‘There speaks the next chairman of the royal academy of science,’ said Nickleby.

  The three of them gave way to a line of engineers with black sewage poles, then Nickleby pointed to a horseless carriage in the shadow of a building. It was one of the six-wheeled imports from the Catosian League, its high-tension clockwork mechanism far in advance of the crude Jackelian copies that could be seen clattering over the horse dung on Middlesteel’s avenues.

  ‘You can afford this?’ Molly eyed the pensman suspiciously. ‘Do you write for The Illustrated or do you own it?’

  Nickleby smiled mysteriously. ‘I also write, Molly.’

  Ver’fey and Molly fitted snugly in the red leather couch behind the driver’s seat, a retractable cover behind their heads in case rain fell on the open cab. The carriage started with a thrum and Molly could almost feel the tension of the interlocking springs under their seat. She remembered a cartoon – possibly from Nickleby’s own Illustrated – of the Guardian who had opposed the introduction of the horseless carriages; the politician being launched from a cloud of exploding clockwork towards the floor of parliament, with the words, ‘M’lords, regard my unsafe seat’ inked into the speech balloon. But it was mostly the cheap Jackelian imitations that exploded. Mostly.

  Nickleby drove them through the handsome boulevards and past the stately houses and crescents of Haggswood. School had just finished and children in matching red and brown uniforms were walking home, some accompanied by nannies in austere black robes and prams just as dark.

  Holding the steering wheel between his legs, Nickleby tugged a mumbleweed pipe out of his coat pocket. He opened the door of his cab and banged the pipe on the road’s cobbles to empty it. He then proceeded to refill the pipe with grey Concorzian leaves. The pensman lit his pipe as he weaved their horseless carriage between a hansom cab and a milk cart doing its afternoon rounds – the plodding shire horse made skittish by the carriage’s thrum as it was overtaken. Molly winced. They must have been pelting along at nearly twenty miles an hour and Nickleby was steering the contraption with his knees!

  Very’fey leaned over and whispered, ‘He’s always doing that.’

  The tree-lined streets began to narrow and the residential crescents and their faux-marble facades gave way to Middlesteel proper. At one point, Molly thought she saw smoke rising from the east, wisps of black oily haze between the towering pneumatics of Sun Gate, gulls sweeping up on the thermals.

  Her suspicions were confirmed when they came up to a wooden pole suspended across the road from a couple of barriers. Three crushers – two constables and a brigadier – nodded politely. Anyone riding an import from the city-states would warrant extra civility.

  ‘Brigadier,’ said Nickleby. ‘Has there been an incident along the road?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, sir. The dockers’ combination has been rioting. Four other combinations have come out in support and now there’s trouble outside the palace as well as the House of Guardians.’ The policeman pointed up the road. A column of craynarbians was trotting down the street three abreast, their thorax shells painted in black. They carried round metal shields, the yellow hedgehog arms of the national police painted in the centre.

  Ver’fey stood up and waved. ‘The Echo Street Heavy Brigade.’

  Molly stared up – the street was briefly eclipsed by the dark shadow of an aerostat. She read the name on the side, the RAN Resolute.

  ‘Dear Circle!’ Nickleby sounded astonished. ‘Parliament’s not sitting – who’s ordered in the navy?’

  One of the constables gazed up perplexed. ‘Ham Yard’s been in contact with the First Guardian, sir. We received instructions from his country residence through the crystal-grid to bring up army units from Fort Holloden in case they were needed.’

  ‘But Hoggstone wouldn’t order in the navy in an election year,’ said Nickleby. ‘The Purists would be massacred at the polls by the Roarers and Heartlanders.’

  Doors were opening along the belly of the massive airship, and metal cages filled with gleaming glass fin-bombs were lowered into view.

  ‘They’re clearing for action,’ whispered the constable. He obviously could not believe what he was seeing.

  ‘We’ve never bombed Middlesteel,’ said Nickleby. ‘Not even during the worst days of the Carlist uprising.’

  Everyone in the street had stopped to stare up at the disappearing bulk of the airship. She was heading east, towards the river and the docks.

  ‘Red tips,’ said Nickleby.

  Molly looked at the writer. Tears were welling in his eyes.

  ‘Red tips?’

  ‘Red tips for firebombs, Molly. Green for dirt-gas. Blue for explosive and shrapnel. I was called up into the navy information section during the Two-Year War. I was there when we flattened Norlay and the Commonshare’s other mill towns. I never thought I’d see this again. And never at home.’

  A collective gasp rose up from the Middlesteelians in the street as rumbles of man-made thunder echoed in the distance, the ground trembling. The two girls and the pensman held tight as their six-wheeled carriage shuddered. The sound died. A hush fell over the city. Down the street, the disciplined legion of craynarbian crushers still trotted in formation; they had not even broken a step. Molly doubted they would be needed now when they got to the scene of the disturbance.

  Nickleby backed the horseless carriage up and headed down a side street.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Where else when news happens, Molly?’ said the pensman. ‘We’re off to Dock Street.’

  Pistols drawn, the first mate and the captain of the red-coated marines on the RAN Resolute faced down their bomb-bay crew.

  ‘Back to your posts, damn you,’ shouted the first mate.

  ‘They weren’t revolutionaries,’ said a sailor. ‘I didn’t even see anyone down there with a pitchfork, let alone a rifle.’

  More jack cloudies were crowding up the passage from the lower deck, trying to push past the two officers.

  ‘The skipper had orders,’ said the first mate. ‘From the House and the Board of the Admiralty.’

  ‘You seen ’em?’ yelled a sailor.

  ‘Let’s have the orders in writing, then,’ demanded another.

  ‘Don’t you play the barrack-room lawyer with me, Pemberton,’ barked the captain of marines. ‘The first one of you jacks that crosses this line is a dead man.’

  A sailor waved a wicked-looking fin-bomb loading hook. ‘You’ve only got two pistols, that’s enough for two of us.’

  ‘Enough for you, lad,’ warned the first mate.

  The captain of marines glanced back at one of the nervous redcoats holding the corridor. ‘Get the airmaster down here, now!’

  Captain Dorian Kemp, airmaster of the Royal Aerostatical Navy vessel Resolute lay next to the pistol he had just used to take his own life, what was left of his brains cooling in the wind blowing through an open hatch.

  A dwarf with two heads did a little jig near the fallen officer. One of the heads was full-size, the other a shrunken, puppet-like growth. ‘Reached into his mind and pop. Reached into his mind and bang.’

  His companion
looked with pity at the feeble-minded fey creature dancing around the corpse. There but for the path of the Circle went half the Special Guard. ‘You’ve done a fine job, brother. The bombing run’s finished. Time to be away.’

  ‘All I had to practise with in my cells was the rats,’ giggled the two-headed figure. ‘I made them stand up and dance for me. Fighting in battles, my brave rats lining up and attacking each other with stones. Hold the line. Hold the line.’

  ‘No more games with rats, brother. You can make the hamblins do anything now,’ said the man, his skin starting to shimmer with witch-light. ‘Possess anyone you like.’

  ‘You won’t throw me back in my cell, will you?’ pleaded the dwarf.

  ‘Of course not,’ lied his companion, scooping up the small fey thing. Not until the wild bunch’s real job was done at least. There were standards to maintain, after all.

  With a spurt of energy the man and his minuscule passenger accelerated out of the airship, contemptuously kicking the hatch shut, before vanishing into the sooty clouds floating up from the ground.

  Middlesteel’s docks were a single wall of flame, the fires of the rioting mob burning out of control, now the dark brooding shape floating above them had spilled her deadly cargo.

  The twenty-fourth floor of The Middlesteel Illustrated News was a riot of staff running past writing desks. The clatter of iron typewriters – hulking machines that translated the fusillade of words onto transaction engine punch cards – a background to the shouts and din across the open floor, drowning out what Nickleby was trying to say to Molly.

  ‘Need a comment from the Admiralty Board.’

  ‘Bodies are coming in to the Circle of Targate hospital, survivors too.’

  ‘There is no comment.’

  ‘Printers say they want extra money.’

  ‘Send someone around to the First Skylord’s residence. Doorstep him.’

  ‘Pay it.’

  ‘Interviews. Now.’

  Through the confusion and hustle a crow-like figure on two crutches swung his corpulent bulk like an obscene pendulum – eyes bright and malicious, surveying the mayhem. It was him – no doubt about it, the editor and proprietor of The Illustrated. Molly remembered a cartoon of Gabriel Broad shortly after his legs had been broken by the flash mob – pointing a crutch accusingly across the magistrate’s court. ‘The truth needs no crutch,’ scratched next to his mouth in a speech balloon.

  ‘Come you here, boy,’ his voice boomed across the room, before continuing towards the figure he had singled out. ‘Middlesteel surprised by aerial assault? I am surprised when any of you drunken sots show up on time for the morning shift. I would be surprised if my wife brought me a glass of warm jinn before tucking me up for the night. When I see one of our own Circle-damned aerostats dropping firebombs on the capital of our great and glorious land, I am not, sir, surprised. I am violated. I am jiggered by the enormity of it all. Pull the lead on that subtitle. If I ever see the like of that again on one of my inside pages, I will be surprising you by pulling your record of employment from the punch card drawer and feeding it into the fires still burning along the east bank of the river, do you understand?’

  Turning from the quivering writer, the editor spotted Nickleby and Molly and swung his way over to them, stabbing his twin crutches into the floor like a duellist’s sword blows. ‘Found another waif for me to employ, Nickleby? I’ll be applying to Greenhall to re-register the paper as a Circlist charity before the week is out.’

  Ver’fey had already disappeared with copy on the attack for the printers, but the editor obviously had a good memory for details. Molly and her rescuer followed the old man into his office, large round crystal portholes cut into the walls of the pneumatic structure giving them a good view of the smoke streaming into the air at the other end of the city. When the door was shut the din of the pensmen’s pit was instantly cut off; in the silence Molly could hear the soft flow of water shifting through the building’s rubber walls.

  ‘Walls have ears, eh?’ said the editor. ‘So this is the girl? Right now, m’dear, I could get more money for trading your head than I could if I sold The Illustrated lock, stock.’

  ‘It’s a strange old world,’ said Molly.

  Broad looked out at the smoke gushing into the sky. ‘Indeed it is, m’dear. My paper would be empty most days if it were not.’

  ‘I told you there was more to the Pitt Hill slayings than a lone lunatic,’ said Nickleby. ‘Molly here is a proof of it, I am sure.’

  ‘We need to find the link,’ said the editor. ‘What connects this young lady to a bunch of society’s finest with their blood leeched out like so much desert butcher’s meat?’

  ‘You’ll protect me?’ said Molly. ‘Help me find the truth?’

  ‘Truth has a price,’ replied the editor, raising his crutches. ‘It extracts a cost from those that stare at it too long, those that seek it too zealously, eh Nickleby?’ He looked meaningfully at the journalist. Nickleby shrugged and looked away. ‘Well, m’fella here has the best nose for a story of anyone on The Illustrated. If someone can help you work out why your dear flame-coloured head is worth a Guardian’s ransom, it’s Nickleby here. As for protection, where’s that fierce bookworm with the amazon-sized arms – isn’t she on the payroll?’

  ‘Just for the finder’s fee,’ said Nickleby. ‘She’s off to parts foreign now.’

  The editor shook his head. ‘More grist for the mill for the penny sheets, I don’t doubt. Well, I can always pull a couple of whippers from that gang of thieves I pay to guard the print mill and have them follow you about.’

  Nickleby shook his head. ‘Anonymity is our best defence now, Gabriel. None of the mug-hunters and toppers looking for Molly knows that she is in our care. If you post an armed guard outside my gates, word’s going to get back to the flash mob sooner or later. People will start wondering why.’

  ‘So be it,’ said the editor. ‘That old salt who hangs around your place looks like he might be handy with a Sleeping Henry, eh?’

  There was a knock at the door and a breathless runner stumbled in holding out a note. ‘The Board of the Admiralty denies that the Resolute had orders to even be in Middlesteel, let alone bomb it. They’re sending the RAN Amethyst and Upholder to escort the Resolute back to Shadowclock, with orders to bring her down if she resists.’

  ‘By the Lord Harry,’ exclaimed Broad. ‘A duel over the city. You boy, tell the desk to make ready for a second edition. Nickleby, you did some time on the decks, does the Board’s story sound likely to you?’

  ‘An airmaster can be hung for showing initiative with their position in a squadron formation,’ said Nickleby. ‘A skipper doesn’t change the crew’s jinn ration without written orders from the Board.’

  ‘Fella must have gone barking mad,’ said the editor. ‘Boy, boy, send someone down to the taverns where the jack cloudies soak their troubles, get me the name of the skipper of the Resolute. Anything about his background – see if this chappie was barking, history of lunacy in the blood, all of that.’

  ‘Dear Circle,’ said Nickleby. ‘Our own city. I still can’t believe it; it’s like a dream.’

  ‘Stuff of nightmares more like, eh?’ said Broad. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this one and have someone’s head on the end of a pike for it.’

  ‘By writing about it?’ said Molly.

  Broad furrowed his brow and picked up an edition of his broadsheet. ‘It’s easy to mistake this for a couple of sheets of wood pulp, m’dear, but you’d be wrong. This is a weapon. No less than that bloated airship floating above Middlesteel; and this can do a great deal more than burn a district to the ground. It can inflame an entire nation to arms. It can send the people stampeding in one direction or t’other at a polling booth. It can burrow into the heart of the flash mob and turn over the stone of the underworld so everyone can see the worms and maggots crawling through our sewage. It can uproot the stench and sweat of a Stallwood Avenue mill and slap it down inside the co
mfortable five-storey house of an articled clerk. It can take a selfless act of bravery and make it seem like the grossest foolhardiness – or it can take an idiot and raise him up to strut across the floor of parliament like a peacock.’

  ‘But it extracts its price, Molly,’ said Nickleby.

  ‘Not today,’ said Broad, pointing to the silhouette of the Resolute, still cloaked by waves of black smoke. ‘Today the city has paid the bill for us.’

  Count Vauxtion swirled the remains of his brandy in the large glass. As they should, the legs of the drink made golden fingers against the side of the crystal. Only three bottles of the 1560 left now. The Carlists had seized the rest of his cellar when the Quatérshiftian nobility found itself overrun during the people’s revolution. Drunk in a single evening to fuel the orgy of devastation which saw his chateau razed to the ground, his family arrested, his workers ejected from their cottages and most senseless of all – the grain stores torched. So much of his legacy, his life had gone in that single night.

  Ka’oard entered the library, holding a package wrapped in brown paper. ‘I hope you are not brooding again, sir.’

  Count Vauxtion allowed the craynarbian retainer to take the brandy glass out of his hand. ‘I find it hard to focus on the words in the books, old shell. I am not sure if that is a function of my fading sight or the distraction of too many accumulated memories.’

  The craynarbian placed the package on the reading table. ‘Your beard and my shell are turning white together, sir.’

  ‘Do you remember the hills outside Estreal, Ka’oard? Your shell took a few cracks then.’

  ‘The King’s dispute with the Steammen Free State?’ said the craynarbian. ‘I remember it well, sir. The cavalry made a disastrous charge against the steammen knights. Colonel Weltard died in the saddle, taken down by a flame-gun.’

  ‘He always was a fool. Brave as a sand lion, of course, but a fool,’ said the count. ‘Had a lovely wife just as fearless as he was. She had a few choice words for the crowd when they took her to the Gideon’s Collar, as I recall. Stood on that platform and cursed the mob for ten minutes before the Carlists dragged her into the bolter.’